


"he tastes like lemon grass,"

by zacefronspants



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Fluff and Angst, Light Angst, M/M, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-05 23:23:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13398456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zacefronspants/pseuds/zacefronspants
Summary: "This week, the letter he gave Harry was another ‘G’ and he’s slowly figuring out his name, the boy with the cracks in his smile."





	"he tastes like lemon grass,"

**Author's Note:**

> basically this had been eating at me for weeks and i finally wrote it out

It’s January when Harry meets him, his shoes are covered in blackened snow and his sand colored hair are damp with melted snowflakes.

He smiles at Harry and his eyes crinkle and it makes him feel warm inside, a feeling he’d thought long forgotten. And it goes on for months, meeting in the middle of the day at the corner coffee shop and talking about mundane things like laundry and macaroni and cheese, simple questions and it’s nice. He’s lovely in his brightly colored shirts and sometimes button downs.

He looks like home.

And then he asks Harry one day, “Hey, darlin’, what’s it like to feel lost?” and it makes his smile dampen. Harry can recount on his fingers how many times he’d felt lost.

So he tells him, “It’s when you’re talking with your group of friends and someone suddenly starts to talk over you so you close your mouth and listen to what the other person is saying because you become background noise,” and he’s squeezing the biscuit in his hands so tightly it smashes and he’s looking at Harry with wide eyes. “When your mom suddenly decides she no longer wants you because you kiss people of the same sex and others who don’t fit the gender spectrum, it’s the feeling of failing a test you studied so hard for that your eyes were going cross,”

He looks at him and his outstretched hand and kisses his thumb, “It’s how I feel when I look at you because you look like a home and I’ve not had one in so long,”

-

“Hey,” it’s orange outside now and it’s almost time for him to go home and get out of his suit, “what’s hatred feel like?” And Harry almost stumble because holy shit, it’s a nasty feeling. “It’s a feeling that consumes you in one swallow and it tastes like metal. It sits on your shoulders and whispers awful and cruel things,” he whispers, his throat is dry now. He look a affronted but Harry barrels on, “It causes rifts between you and your friends because it’s such an angry feeling, really.”   
  
He’s reaching out and trying to soothe Harry because he can feel his hands shaking. “It’s like when you get to work and see that one person in the hallway who singles you out every time you work together,” and he’s not sure how to tell him it’s the murky lakes you pass by on the bridge towards downtown, that it’s the couples laughing together and kissing each other because Harry envies them but he’s angry he’s alone.   
  
So he says, “It’s like you’re drowning, and logically you know you need to keep flailing your arms and legs, but you’re so heavy with it that you just let yourself drown,” and Harry lets him hold onto his hand with his smaller ones and it’s almost okay again.

-

This week, the letter he gave Harry was another ‘G’’ and he’s slowly figuring out his name, the boy with the cracks in his smile. But this week, he also asked Harry how it felt to be sad and it bothered him because he doesn’t know how to tell him that it’s different for everyone.

 Harry was unable to form the sentence, “When I am sad, my fingers grow very cold,” because he doesn’t think he’d believe Harry if he’d just left it at that. He wasn’t sure how to tell him that he feels cold and void, like the empty houses he walks past with dead flower beds on their lawns. That his mind felt like the museum walls covered in artwork that no one understands and that his arms felt too heavy.

 Harry didn’t know what to tell him other than, “My body is full of waves and when they crash on the shores they destroy everything in their path,” and he pretends to not see the look of pity on his softly freckled face.

-

“What’s loss feel like?” He asks Harry one night, fingers meshing into his hair and he stops for a minute and opens his mouth several times, trying to think of how to simplify how it swallows pieces of him at a time, how it hangs itself in the corners on the lifeless walls of his house. The way it burns him and the way it picks and picks and picks at his bones until he finds himself stuck in the a swimming pool of empty glasses and decanters of scotch. 

He starts, “It feels like,” but then he stops because it doesn’t feel, but it tastes like the way his lungs burned the first time he took a swig of alcohol, it’ll sound like every sad song he wrote off and is now his entire life and then, then it’ll feel like he’s on fire and like he’s drowning all at the same time. He tries again, “It’s like,” but nothing bubbles on his tongue.

Nothing fills his mouth so he just shrugs his shoulders limply. And he just looks at Harry for a while before nodding his sleepy head at him.

-

“Hey,” he asks Harry one night, his fingers tracing the hills on the table cloth, “what’s it like to be in love?”

Harry wants to tell him that it was the most beautiful thing, that it was warm and soft. Loud and wholesome. That love was the core in everything, but he couldn’t lie to him because love isn’t beautiful, or wholesome. It’s not like what the movies and poems and songs and books make it look like.

Love was wanting to set himself on fire and feeling like his veins were full of ice because he cannot help but feel cold when the other was not there next to him. It was late nights sitting on the floor of his bedroom or in the bathtub with so many bubbles he couldn’t fucking see his own reflection in the water. It was burying himself so deep into someone that he sprouted fucking roots where his fingernails should be. It’s being so painfully aware of the others’ interests, quirks, saying, mannerisms, routines that he started to mimic them, even when they’ve said they didn’t want him anymore. It’s being so naked in front of them everyday at every hour, minute and second.

“It’s painful,” is what Harry decided on telling him.

-

“Hey,” he says softly, “you are you in love?”

And Harry couldn’t say yes. He couldn’t tell him that his chest  has an ache it will never recover from because he’s taken his heart and wears around his neck with his silly jackets and second hand suits. He couldn’t tell him that when he kisses him his brain goes ninety to nothing because it  feels right. He couldn’t tell him that love scares him because if he got tired of the things he found endearing, then what would he say when he got sick of Harry, too?

So he says, “Nearly,” and then Harry adds, smiling at the confused look on his face, “I’m almost there Eggsy. I still can’t believe your name is Eggsy.”

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr @togxpi


End file.
